10 tips to help your website get more bookings

If you’re a tour company and you have a website, this is obviously a good thing. For a start, you’re one step ahead of some of your competitors. Secondly, once your site is optimised correctly, you’re discoverable online. But simply having a website isn’t enough. If you want to help your website get more bookings, it’s an on-going project.

1. Ensure your website is responsive

For those of you unaware, ‘responsive’ is internet terminology for ‘responds to what device you’re browsing on – desktop, smartphone or tablet’. If your website isn’t responsive, you are losing money this very second. It’s that simple.

If your site looks good on a smartphone – great. If not, get on to your web team ASAP and do whatever it takes get it responsive ASAP. Once your site is optimised, we can help you sell and manage with a mobile optimised booking process.

2. Use strong imagery - a picture is worth a thousand words

If you are a business in the travel industry, you can write the most beautiful words in the world on your website, but if you don’t have good images you’ll find it hard converting those website visitors customers.

3. Keep your customers updated with a blog

There was a time when you could load your website with keywords and your website would be found by search engines. This isn’t the case any more – Google’s algorithm has changed over the last few years and if you don’t have a content strategy you’re going to find it hard to build a web presence.

With a blog you can tailor content for certain search terms, keep your customers updated with the latest news, position yourself as the authoritative voice in your space, show the people behind the company…the list goes on.

4. Publish good content

If you do make the smart move of having a lot of content on your website, you’re going to make sure it’s good content. To do this, make the text as engaging as possible. Also, before you publish it, assign an editor within your company to proofread your text before it goes live. A website with quality copy will keep visitors on the site and eventually convert them into customers.

5. Include a call to action

This might seem an obvious one, but the amount of websites that don’t include a ‘Book now’ button is alarming. You need software that enables easy online bookings – something that we can provide. Once you have this in place you can manage your availability in real-time, accept online payments and more.

6. Collect customer reviews of your tours or activities

We live in a world now where everybody is a publisher and everybody is a critic. Gone are the days of going to tour guides for reviews of products. Now any website can have them…including yours.

7. Think about languages

Nobody knows your business better than you – you know what the demographics are of the people who use your product and you know what markets you’re product sells in.

If you see potential for growth in Latin America, or if a large portion of your customers are in a French-speaking country, you need to think about having your website in Spanish and French. This is an important part of our strategy at TrekkSoft – our software is built multilingual and multi-currency throughout the system.

8. Is your website optimised for search engines?

If you have a website, it isn’t necessarily going to be visited by anybody. To be found it needs to be optimised for search engines. To do this you need to ensure you’ve thought about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) when building it. Think about what search terms you want to rank for. Then make sure your website has these keywords in all the right places. To make sure our software is as valuable as possible, our software includes a powerful set of SEO tools to help you reach more people.

9. Make it shareable

The people of today like to multi-task. While they’re enjoying a meal at a restaurant, they’re also Instagramming it. So while they’re reading about your tour, they’re probably going to share it. Make sure you make it as shareable as possible by integrating social media widgets onto your site and your blog. Our social media ebook can help you with this.

10. Respond to analytics

A huge part of any online marketing strategy is analysis. You won’t know if your efforts are working if you don’t analyse the results and subsequently respond to the data. Make sure you study the findings from your Google Analytics and AdWords campaigns. Likewise, if you’re using our software, since you can integrate TrekkSoft with Google Analytics, make sure you’re studying this data.

Follow these tips and you will see your website get more bookings in just a short space of time.

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Colm is Founder and Managing Director of digital marketing agency Sixtwo Digital. After running Hostelworld.com’s content and social media for almost 11 years he felt it was time to branch out on his own, using all his experience to educate others in the travel space.

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TrekkSoft was founded to address the needs of our local tour and activity industry in Interlaken, Switzerland. We understand the industry and you can rely on our team to onboard your business, introduce you to digital best practice, and guide you to success from the start.